


Who You Are In the Hospital

by Seiberwing



Series: Coward's Crossroads [2]
Category: Hogan's Heroes
Genre: Gen, Heel Face Turn, Hospital, Mentions of Prisoner Abuse, Nazis, Prison camp, Recovering From Being Nazi-Allied, Spies, Sympathy for the Enemy, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 05:00:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: A very, very long-delayed sequel toWho You Are In the Dark. Colonel Klink visits the prisoner whose life he saved and confronts some unpleasant truth about himself. (Who knew that being a Nazi-affiliated prison camp kommandant might lead you to have an less than upstanding moral alignment?)





	Who You Are In the Hospital

Klink was sixteen the last time talking to a woman had been so terrifying. At the time, being rejected had seemed like the worst possible thing in the world. Now it seemed like a light slap on the wrist compared to what might happen now.

Klink felt in his coat pocket for the message Hogan had given him. It was a simple mission. All he had to do was deliver the information to an underground agent and take the reply back to Stalag 13, an eight year old could do it. Hogan had assured him no one knew of his treachery but Klink couldn’t help but feel as if he was being watched. Gestapo agents were skilled at looking like normal men and women. Anyone in the bar could be ready to grab him by the arm and drag him off to be tortured for information he surely didn’t have.

But there were obligations, and morals, and The Right Thing To Do which admittedly had been a much easier thing To Do when he was safe in his stalag. Klink swallowed his fear and approached the bar.

“Excuse me?” he said, voice trembling. 

“Hm?” The barmaid (Helga? Alida?) gave him a quick, distracted glance as she filled a beer mug. Klink was a familiar face around the bar and he’d often flirted with her in the past, though she barely gave him the time of day. It was all clear now, of course. He had been the enemy. Perhaps now he’d have a chance once he was able to keep his knees from knocking.

Klink lowered his voice to a murmur and rushed through the code phrase Hogan had given to him. “I have a letter here from a man who loves you.” He thrust the message in her direction, his tense fingers crinkling the paper. 

The barmaid’s suspicious eyes flicked up to give him a disdainful glare. “Have I broken his heart?” It was the counterphrase, but it seemed to be combined with some mild annoyance at his presence. She thought the letter was actually from him.

Klink shook his head hard. Not him, no. “Not broken. Not yet.” Her expression went from annoyance to confusion as she took the letter from his hands. Was it that hard to believe that he was a spy? But perhaps he was just that good of an actor.

She read it without comment, then gave a slight nod and flashed him a sweet, false smile. “Then I will write him a reply.” The barmaid slipped into the back room and left Klink alone at the bar.

Klink reached for a beer and took a deep, bracing swallow.

A leather gloved hand came down on his arm. “What do you think you are doing?” the man beside him growled. 

Klink’s breath caught in his lungs. The man bore a scar on his grizzled cheek and wore the same type of black trenchcoat that had so often darkened Klink’s office and brought danger in its wake. He’d been found out. They were going to take him away and torture him, then shoot him when he couldn’t hand over more names for them to hunt down. They’d grind him down to nothing and destroy the tattered remains of his reputation. “I…I…”

The man leaned in and hissed, with malice and venom in his rasping voice, “That is my beer you are drinking.”

Klink looked down to his hand at the beer. He snatched his hand away as if it were burnt and laughed as the possibility of a future flooded back to him. “Oh. I’m sorry. It must have been reflex. You know how it is, you’re so used to doing a certain thing at a certain place that you just forget yourself—”

The man shoved him over and curled protectively around his beer. “Go try to forget yourself somewhere else.”

After the barmaid brought back her message Klink was tempted to run back to camp and hide in his office until his heart stopped pounding. But this was a day for being responsible and he had one more stop to make before he took the love letter to Stalag 13.

***

“Down the hall and your left, it’s the second door.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

The nurse flashed Klink a gentle smile. “I’m almost sorry you’re taking him from us. He’s one of the cheeriest patients we have, you’d never know he’d been shot.”

“That does sound like Hans.” Much to his benefit, Klink mused as he headed for Carter’s hospital room. According to Hogan Carter was fluent in German, both in tongue and in accent. His grandparents had been Austrian immigrants and they’d taught him the language. Still, it would be only a matter of time before someone noticed there was no record of such a man stationed in this area. Charming the nurses might keep them from checking too deeply into his background. 

“Good afternoon, Corporal,” Klink said in a chipper voice. He stepped inside the hospital and shut the door behind him.

“Same to you,” Carter replied in German, equally chipper, his face hidden behind the local newspaper. He began to turn the page, stopped, and then slowly peered over the edge with wide eyes. His face turned white.

“Um. Hi,” he said, as his accent emigrated back to America.

Klink chuckled, switching to English to match up. “Don’t worry. I know about everything.”

“Oh, good.” Carter didn’t look soothed. “Er…told you everything about the what?”

Once a magician had let you in on the secret of his trick, it was easier to catch the sleight of hand when someone else did it. Carter was so used to the group’s lies that he was fishing for what story Hogan had fed Klink, to make sure that whatever he said agreed with it. Klink toyed with the idea of stringing him along and making him squirm but the scared puppy expression on the American’s face made him relent.

“I’ve been down to the tunnels. I know about the spying, the sabotage, the escaped prisoners, everything.” He took a seat next to Carter’s bed.

Carter began folding the paper in stiff motions, then unfolded and refolded it as he tried to figure out the creases. “Am I in trouble?” he asked, looking to the door as if expecting the Gestapo to move in at any minute. One hand settled on his wounded leg. Running wouldn’t be an option for him.

“No, no, you’re fine,” Klink rushed to explain, one hand raised. “I’m on your side now. Hogan let me in on the secret so I’d join you.”

“Oh!” Carter broke out into a relieved smile. “Boy, you really had me going there. I thought we were all going to get shot. Hogan really told you everything?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” Carter stroked his chin, taking in the matter. He looked like a child doing an impression of an adult, with all the intensity he put into the gesture. “What kind of everything?” he said cautiously. 

“I’ve been in the tunnels where you keep your radio and spare uniforms. I know about the Unsung Heroes and your Papa Bear.”

Carter gaped. “They told you _all_ of the everything? _You?_ ”

Klink pattered his shoulder reassuringly, as if he were a kindly uncle. “I know it’s probably a bit confusing having someone you hated as an ally even if I did save your life—”

“I didn’t hate you,” Carter broke in.

Klink blinked, sitting up straight again. “You…didn’t?” Now that he knew to ignore the false flattery the prisoners had given him, it had seemed to Klink that he’d been viewed by his charges with mild to moderate derision at the best of times. They used him, and when they weren’t using him they mocked or harassed him. Protecting Carter had obviously bought him some respect, but everyone he’d spoken to was consistently baffled that he’d risen to the occasion. 

“No!” Carter insisted. He seemed offended at the very notion. “I mean, we were on opposite sides and all, we weren’t exactly buddies, but I didn’t hate you.”

“But I was your jailer,”

Klink said, bafflement overwhelming his expression.

“It was your job. And you never really did anything too nasty with it, I think 30 days in the cooler was about the worst and most of the time you didn’t even carry through on it.” And as Hogan had demonstrated, they had a tunnel running into the cooler for transporting food and companionship, so it was not nearly as harsh a punishment as Klink had originally assumed.

“You were just…y’know, on a really nasty side and weren’t doing much about it.” Carter carefully sat up, teeth gritted as he worked out how much motion his wounds would allow. “Look,” he finally said once he was settled. “Me and the guys, we’ve all been at this for a while. And we’ve been all over the place in Germany doing all sorts of things. And I’ve seen a lot of stuff. A lot of really, really bad stuff.” 

"Yes, I can't imagine."Out of all of them Carter had seemed the least likely to be a soldier, let alone a spy. His naiveté and childlike glee at small matters made him seem like a puppy let loose in a dogfighting kennel. At the beginning of his imprisonment at Stalag 13, Klink had even wondered if Carter had lied on his enlistment form and was secretly sixteen years old, but he’d eventually figured that Carter was just like that. Cheery, hopeful, wilting when the world crushed his dreams but bouncing back with enthusiasm. 

Carter continued. “I mean, you thought you were a pretty iron-fisted guy, but you weren’t a Hochstetter kind of guy. Just a…” He waved one hand and tilted his eyes down, leading Klink to finish the insult Carter wouldn’t say with “A coward?”

“Yeah. That. Like if you were born in America you’d be all Yankee Doodle and apple pie instead. You were just on whatever side was the best side.”

Klink chuckled ruefully, removing his monocle and rubbing his thumb around the edges. “Apparently I wasn’t very good at it anyway.”

Carter laughed with him. “I guess it was a pretty big shock to find out.” For a moment Klink felt as if they were equals, on the same side of the war and at the same rank. Comrades. When was the last time he’d had one of those? 

“Running a prison camp was really the only thing I thought I was doing right and then it’s…” Klink waved an aimless hand and monocle, feeling the fool again. “I really can’t do anything in this life right.” He couldn’t even deliver a letter without letting the entire bar know how twitchy he was.

“Yeah, but when you’re good at running a camp you’re probably bad at being a decent guy. The one I escaped out of my first time, it was…he…wasn’t a whole lot like you.” Carter gnawed at his lower lip. “The kommandant there was Colonel Schneider. He didn’t treat the prisoners very well. The guards would pinch our Red Cross packets and order us to run around or do exercises for no good reason. Schneider didn’t care. He’d just watch. And we had this one guy, Marlowe. Corporal Aaron Marlowe. He was from Texas. Decent guy. I didn’t know him too well.” 

His voice was starting to dip down to a whisper and his gaze turned to the side. Klink wanted to tell Carter to shut up. He knew where this was going. _I wasn’t like this,_ he told himself, but his newly-turncoated brain fired back _But you wanted to be like this, didn’t you? The Iron Colonel, feared by your enemies and loved by your subordinates?_

“There was this one day where we were all lined up for roll call and Schneider was going off on this big tear about how many American planes got shot down the night before, and how many American girls were going to be crying because their boyfriends weren’t coming home. And right when Schneider was going back inside Marlowe made this little noise.”

“A noise?” Klink prayed for an emergency that would give him an excuse to leave, but he stayed rooted to his seat. No, no, he deserved this for wanting this.

Carter put his tongue between his lips and recreated the sound by blowing air over it.

“Ah.”

“I don’t think he thought anyone but us would hear him. But Schneider did. He turned around and told the guards to pull Marlowe out of the ranks. They made him get down in the mud and do push-ups and yelled at him for not doing them fast enough. I thought that was gonna be the end of it. It was just one little noise. Nobody’d get torn up over that. And then Schneider took one of the guards’ rifles and…” 

“Schneider shot him,” Klink finished hurriedly, hoping to finally end it.

Carter shook his head, a nervous twitch of a gesture. There’d been less pain in his eyes when he was bleeding his life out onto the forest floor. “Uh-uh. He turned it around and hit him in the back of the neck with the butt of the rifle. When Marlowe went down, Schneider flipped him over with his boot and kept hitting him in the face and the neck. There was something horrible about his eyes—Schneider, I mean. It was like looking at a rabid dog or something. I could see his teeth. He was…he was liking it. A lot. I couldn’t figure how a person could be like that.” The young sergeant was starting to curl in on himself, fingers tightening into nervous fists.

Klink wasn’t sure how to respond. He kept up his sympathetic nodding and felt his stomach turn over. 

“I’d seen people be bullies,” Carter went on. “But I’d never seen anyone be such a monster to another human being, especially not over such a tiny noise. When I told Colonel Hogan about it he said it was just an excuse for Schneider to do what he already wanted to. He said some people were just like that and a lot of them were Nazis. When you’re a Nazi you think everyone who isn’t on your side isn’t worth more than an earthworm and you can do whatever you want to them. I’ve never hated anyone in my life but I started hating him just for that. I couldn’t get why someone would do that to someone who hadn’t done nothing to them. Do you?” He looked up to Klink, and as the silence drew out Klink realized Carter was waiting for him to answer.

Because he’d been on their side.

“It’s…pride, I suppose. A feeling that you’re part of some elite class just by existing,” he said, worrying the edge of Carter’s blanket between his fingers. The young man’s eyes were fixed on him, narrowed in a genuine attempt to understand what Klink had been steeped in for the whole war.

“I was never good at anything. Every step of the way I felt sabotaged. Mostly, I sabotaged myself. The Luftwaffe was the only place that gave me any prestige and even then I was bottom of the barrel. Half my promotions were because the person above me was killed or discharged.” It hurt to have to admit all this outside his own head. Desperately pretending he wasn’t barely competent at managing his own life was the main skill that kept him afloat through two wars.

“Then you have someone say that you’ve been destined to win all along, that it’s only a matter of time before the world’s at your feet. The only reason it’s taken you so long to get there is that you’ve had inferior creatures dragging you down, not through any fault of your own. And when you’re better than them, and it’s their fault you haven’t gotten what you deserve, you have every right to treat them like the parasites they are.”

“That whole Master Race garbage?” Carter put in, to which Klink gave another slow nod. The young American's expression softened again.

“Hey, Kommandant? I mean, uh. Colonel?” He leaned in, winced, and pulled back again. ““If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell Hogan or the other guys?”

“Of course, I promise.”

“I mean it, not a word. They’ll never let me live it down if they know.” Carter wet his lips as Klink leaned in to catch his words. “I always kinda…felt for you. I mean I didn’t like you—I like you now, it’s kinda hard to not like a guy who saves your life but you hadn’t done that before—but I can sorta get that. I was pretty terrible at most things and everyone made fun of me for it, but now I have something I’m good at. Maybe being an underground spy’ll be your big break? Like you’ll feel good at it, without having to go all Nazi on the situation. It was a pretty big break for me too.” 

Like ‘going Nazi’ was like a drinking problem. What in hell’s name was this boy doing as a soldier?

“And what was your big break? Spywork?”

Carter grinned. “Oh geeze, not that. It’s bombs.”

Klink blinked. “…bombs.”

“For sabotage. I’m really good at making them, especially when there’s not much to work with, and there wasn’t much point in it back in the States. Hogan says I’m to explosives on a shoestring budget what LeBeau is to cooking, and you’ve had LeBeau’s cooking.” Carter’s eyes lit up. “The big ones are just gorgeous, you know? Like, you remember that bridge that went up last year? That was me. And the munitions plant back in March. Ooh, and this time I stole a tank because I accidentally joined the Fourth Panzer Brigade and—"

Carter went on and on with the same enthusiasm Schultz gave to describing a dessert spread, and Klink forced himself into a coughing fit to get the suddenly terrifying puppy to shut up. “You know, I think we really ought to get you back to camp.”

“Oh. Yeah, we should. I think that nurse kinda goes for me, and I don’t want to want to be a heartbreaker for her. She deserves better, y’know? She brought me a candy bar yesterday.”

Oh, to be young again. Klink held the crutches still while Carter leveraged himself out of bed and balanced on one foot. The boy’s eyes were sparkling.

“You know, I’ve just had a thought,” Klink said, letting Carter lean on him as he got crutches under him.

“Yeah?”

“Before we go back to camp, why don’t we see if the hofbrau offers wounded soldiers a free beer?”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the original version of this back in 2012, and recently refound it while digging through the fics from my previous hard drive. The first draft was much more lenient with Klink's position as a cowering but still supportive part of the German army. Five years onward, my ability to cut two-days-into-being-former Nazis allies a break has lessened, so I increased the weight of the anvil being dropped regarding Colonel Klink's previous allegiances.


End file.
